Comedy-drama. Starring Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini and Laura Morante. Directed by Laurent Tirard. In French with English subtitles. (PG-13. 120 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

"Molière" is a whimsical but flat-footed attempt to account for several lost months in the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to the world as Molière. The historical record shows that when he was 22 years old, he went to debtors' prison. The trail goes cold after his release until, several months later, Molière re-enters history as the leader of a traveling comedy troupe. It was with that troupe that Molière made his reputation and paved the way for his great career in Paris.

Director and co-writer Laurent Tirard imagines for Molière an eventful interlude in which the future playwright had a series of experiences that inspired the mature masterpieces. A bourgeois gentleman by the name of Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini) pays his debts and hires him as an acting teacher. Jourdain, a married man, wants help seducing an acid-tongued young woman (Ludivine Sagnier) and intends to impress her by performing a play, of his own composition, in her presence. He is a hopeless climber, like the Jourdain of Molière's play "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme."

To do this, he needs Molière (Romain Duris) living in his house, but Jourdain doesn't want to arouse his wife's suspicion. So he tells Madame Jourdain (Laura Morante) that Molière is a priest, and Molière presents himself to the lovely lady of the house as Father Tartuffe.

Though "Molière" inspires no scorn - there's no impulse to groan or become irritated when our hero pulls the name Tartuffe out of the ether - the references to Molière's future works fail in both of the ways in which the film would like to succeed. It fails as wit - the humor is leaden. More important, it fails as insight. "Molière" really has little or no ideas to impart regarding Molière's work or its inspirations.

Yet it's not a total bust. For those who particularly gravitate to this sort of costume extravaganza, "Molière" is a restful diversion, perhaps too restful, but still acceptable. And the actors go a long way toward bringing it off. Duris is serviceable as Molière, but Morante infuses Madame Jourdain with her wise and lovely cinematic presence, and Luchini is simply one of the great farceurs of the cinema.

Had this film a half hour more Luchini and a half hour less Duris, it easily could have succeeded as a Molière-inspired romp. As it stands, we're left to appreciate those intermittent moments when "Molière" springs to life.

-- Advisory: Sexual situations.

- Mick LaSalle

'One to Another'

Drama. Starring Lizzie Brocheré, Arthur Dupont, Guillaume Baché and Pierre Perrier. Directed by Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr. (Not rated. 95 minutes. At the Lumiere in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley.)

"One to Another," screened this year at Frameline31 film festival and now opening in select theaters, is a beautiful celebration of excruciating detachment. Or maybe it's an excruciating celebration of detached beauties. Both interpretations are frustratingly possible in this film by Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr, about a group of 18-year-olds who have grown up together and grown bored together as well.

The film's original title is "Chacun Sa Nuit," which the film's subtitles translate as "To Each, Their Night." The meaning of "One to Another" is even more elusive, but it will do as well as the grammatically challenged "To Each, Their Night."

The heart of the story is the relationship of a brother and sister, Pierre (Arthur Dupont) and Lucie (Lizzie Brocheré), separated by a year in age but otherwise inseparable. They have strawberry-colored birthmarks on their butts in common, which becomes useful when we give up trying to figure out who Lucie's in bed with from one moment to the next: All the boys are as beautiful as Lucie, and while you can tell them apart when they're clothed and just being bored, once they're in the sack, it becomes a blur of teenage flesh.

Lucie compares her other lovers with her brother. One of the boys wants to watch another one having sex with Lucie. It would be helpful, he contends, so he'd know how to do it better.

Meanwhile, Pierre worships sex, lives for sex, gets paid for sex. Sex makes him feel like a kamikaze with a purpose, he says - whatever that means. He has sex with his sister, with other boys, with older men. One day, he goes missing. The police question Lucie and the boys, but Lucie suspects a loner who lives nearby.

Eventually, the missing-persons case becomes a murder case, but it's the ultimate MacGuffin: It doesn't mean anything. The film doesn't mean anything either, but it's beautifully photographed and the cast is blindingly gorgeous and frequently naked. To borrow one of Edmund White's titles, "The beautiful room is empty." But, yes, it is beautiful.

No one will mistake Jeff Reigert (Paul Rudd) for Moses or even Charlton Heston, but they all have something in common. Like Moses and Heston, Jeff's job is to introduce the world to the Ten Commandments. But, in David Wain's loopy comedy "The Ten," he is not exactly the picture of virtue.

In fact, surrounded as he is by gigantic replicas of the famous stone tablets, the genial host to this cheesy special presentation is so busy juggling wife Gretchen (Famke Janssen) and girlfriend Liz (Jessica Alba) that he can barely get through a single commandment without breaking one himself. But that venality is part of the charm of this amiable, outrageous and frequently hilarious biblical parody that no one will mistake for the last word on God's word.

Wain and co-writer Ken Marino are veterans of the comedy troupe the State, so it is no surprise that "The Ten" takes the form of a sketch comedy. The built-in pitfall to this kind of comedy is that not all sketches are created equal, something that is abundantly clear right from the very first commandment, when a tyro skydiver (Adam Brody) becomes a false idol after he survives a jump without a parachute. He's permanently imbedded from the waist down in the ground, and his predicament serves as a metaphor for the sketch. It rambles on seemingly interminably and its jokes fall flat; it just never goes anywhere.

After that rocky beginning, the movie settles down as Wain and Marino use the commandments as an excuse to indulge in ridiculous, often surreal and sometimes tasteless humor. One of the more absurd sketches, riffing on "thou shall not kill," features the matinee-idol handsome but goofy Marino as a supercilious surgeon, astounded that the law doesn't get his sense of humor when he leaves a pair of scissors in a patient "as a goof." Later, the same character reappears in a politically incorrect satire of prison stereotypes that blends elements of "Oz" and soap opera in an absurd, crude but amusing scenario.

Fundamentalists might take umbrage, but "The Ten" is not so much blasphemous as it is very silly, and it lives up to the one unbendable commandment of comedy: It's funny.

-- Advisory: Sexual situations and adult language and themes.

- Pam Grady

'Arctic Tale'

Documentary. Directed by Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson. Narrated by Queen Latifah. (G. 96 minutes. At Century 9 in San Francisco, CineArts Sequoia in Mill Valley and Landmark Aquarius in Palo Alto.)

It's a shame that any movie shot on the polar ice caps will get compared with "March of the Penguins," but that Oscar-winning film set the gold standard for the Arctic narrative: an engrossing tale about the preciousness of life, set on an extraordinarily hostile sheet of ice.

In "Arctic Tale," husband-and-wife filmmakers Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson spent 10 years on the Arctic Circle shadowing the coming-of-age of a polar bear cub they named Nanu and of a baby walrus, Seela.

As Nanu and Seela escape predators and learn to hunt, the filmmakers set out to show how global warming has made life more difficult for their young protagonists - which is a clunky argument at times.

In "March," the filmmakers showed a simple story that left the indelible impression that the Arctic is not just a cute place for adorable creatures but also the heart of our planet's life force; in "Arctic," audience members get told about the consequences of global warming in a Walt Disney dichotomy that sometimes condescends, even to its young audience.

At times, it's clear that the filmmakers spliced in scenes of predators nearing Nanu to ratchet up the drama. It's also obvious that they edited in a tag-along friend for the polar bear, a white fox so wispy it should have earned an Antonio Banderas voice-over.

Queen Latifah's narration also lacks the authority of Morgan Freeman, but she cuts just enough urban slang to keep the prose entertaining. When a pack of walruses play after a clam feed, they're "gettin' all up in each other's business."

But Latifah also reads from a script that's rife with overstatement. When Nanu seeks out a meal - long a tradition among wild animals, one assumes - the bear, Latifah reads, "has never been hungrier," and when the ice surface turns soft, "hunting is impossible."

Really? It may sound like nitpicking, but the crafty editing and sloppy overstatement serve only to discredit the filmmakers' argument. If they're playing us for dupes in these areas, where else?

Despite the storytelling faults, Ravetch and Robertson offer remarkable footage from the evaporating Arctic: the first flight of a baby murre, a pack of narwhals ("the unicorns of the North") poking the surface with their needled horns, a herd of walrus swimming in formation as wide as a freightliner.

At the risk of sounding like a global warming skeptic, "Arctic Tale" makes an unpersuasive case that humans are to blame for the shrinking ice caps. Most children who manage to keep their attention through the documentary will rightfully blame the onscreen villain, the aggressive male polar bear.

But in case they're still confused, as the credits roll, towheaded children address the camera directly: "If you make your mom or dad buy a hybrid car, you'll make it easier for polar bears to get around," reads one child.

This may be true, but for the adult who cringes at the sight of children reading Daddy's agenda from a cue card, it's also manipulative, and thus, ineffective.

-- Advisory: Some long shots of polar bears feasting on a walrus carcass.